Lean Startup Machine Changed My Life

I just went through Lean Startup Machine – a 3-day workshop teaching Lean Startup principles (Eric Ries) by having you build a viable business in 72 hours. It was quite the experience… my team and I alternately wanted to throttle each other and slap each other on the back-within the same day.

Basically it comes down to validating riskiest assumptions – to pivot your product until you have one people actually want. A product is not necessarily a physical thing – it is the minimum viable solution – created in the least amount of time possible (e.g. Birchbox starting as a WordPress blog site with an eComm plugin, some posters hung around people’s neck in Times Square).

Our team No Door tackled food delivery into central park, where there’s no specific address.

For my team, we learned that our original idea of “people want food delivered into central park, but can’t… so we’ll provide that” was worthless – nobody cared to have food delivered into the park… and we learned that in about 12 hours from the start… or after 3 hours of talking to people. Then we pivoted to “people in food queues want instant gratification” – lo and behold, we got several people with their hands on their wallets, ready to pay us $5, $6 to skip 10 minutes up in the line (swapping with our lineholder).